This Sydney Research Excellence Initiative examines fake news, alternative facts, lies, bullshit, and propaganda, with the aim to understand them, and to advise on how the truth might survive in this climate.

This is part of the Festival of Democracy 2017
Rob Wijnberg, De Correspondent
Chair: Professor Peter Fray
Comments by Lenore Taylor, The Guardian Australia
Co-hosted by Sydney Ideas, Post-Truth Initiative, UTS School of Communication and Sydney

Wrongful convictions can and do happen – it’s a sad fact of the Australian legal system. This panel looks at how evidence in legal proceedings can inadvertently support false conclusions if handled by non-experts (as is usually the case). Panel members are associate lecturer in psychology Celine van Golde, barrister and senior lecturer in law Miiko Kumar, both of the ‘Not Guilty’ project at the University of Sydney, and professional linguist Helen Fraser, of Forensic Phonetics Australia. They present real-life cases in which errors, by eyewitnesses, police, prosecutors, and other experts led to people spent years in jail following unfair trials. With reference to their ongoing research on human perception and memory they then ask: what can we do to prevent future miscarriages of justice?

An interdisciplinary team that includes top researchers in physics, philosophy, data science, politics and international relations, media and communications, and software engineering, to investigate the threats posed by such ‘post-truth’ phenomena as fake news, ‘alternative facts’ and lying.
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